Office Tech EDU

Best laid plans of mice and men and all that jazz. I had the intention of getting that podcast off of the ground for a year. Since CUE 2019. Actually, the thought had been there for a while, just the execution was lacking. Today, today it went live. Will anyone listen? Probably, maybe, hopefully, but most likely not that many, but if someone can learn even just one thing from it, then it was a good thing that I did it, right? As I move forward I'm going to attempt to blog on the off weeks that I'm not putting together the next podcast. I hope you'll give the podcast a listen, and there are video tutorials in the show notes if needed. Beth

This past week I heard from a coworker that I had the pleasure of working with before taking the position I currently have. We've crossed paths a few times at various work events, and usually, when he's calling me it's because assistance is needed with the student assessment system we use. However, this time, it was because another fellow co-worker shared a slide deck from a presentation two-plus years ago and while he hadn't attended that particular tech session he tried his best to follow along with my slide deck. Of all things, it's one of my favorites within Google Sheets, Filter Views. The issue he was having? He was composing his own student data for his classroom and was keeping his total students tested for that week at the top but wanted to be able to filter the students listed below those totals based on certain criteria. After some troubleshooting as he was getting an error saying that he couldn't filter because of cells being merged, I helped him s...

There's not a lot of events that are held for Educational Office Employees. If you know of a local Association of Education Office Professionals consider yourself lucky. What even is an Association of Educational Office Professionals you might ask if you don't already know? It's a group of office workers, no matter the institution, that work within the educational setting. The various educational councils would be the series of professionals, elementary, middle school, secondary, post-secondary, and educational partners. These associations can be local, such as county or district, state, area (geographical cluster areas) and national. The National Association of Educational Office Professionals is the parent organization for this group of affiliates. The tier then goes, area, state, and local. Depending on your affiliate, if you have one close to you, you may have professional developments, workshop days/nights, team building activities, networking and even celebrating a...

You know those moments when you come across something that you're sure wasn't there last month, maybe even last week, but then it's there? That's what happened to me. Let's go back to a year or so ago during a work meeting we were given that was on how to use Shift +Z. At the time I was all, "How did I not know this existed?" and began using it, a lot. Like more than I probably needed to. For those that don't know what Shift + Z is, well, it's✨ magic.✨ Kidding, it's an organizational tool that is used within Google Drive. It works like this; You select a file that is in your Google Drive. You'd like it to be in another file folder location as well, because well, that makes more sense for your organizational needs, but get this, it makes sense in the first folder too! Well, how many people would say, "Well, just make a copy!" Don't. Do. That. Making a copy makes it so when you make changes to one, the other never gets those ...

Be honest, you've had to search on Google to find a way to convert a PDF into another type of document that would allow you to annotate or edit it. There are MANY of these websites out there for you to choose from. I came across one at CUE18 this year that I've found myself not only using quite a bit, I've turned others at work onto it as well. So, what is it? pdfcandy.com  That's it. One website. Only this one website has made my life so much easier. I can even do this on my phone! So how does it work? Tools you need to have: A device, an internet or data connection, and a pdf or document you want to be reformatted. Step 1: Go to pdfcandy.com Step 2: Choose your language of choice if it's not English by clicking the flag in the upper right-hand corner.  Step 3: Choose what type of format you want your document to become Warning, there are a LOT of choices Step 4: Attach/Upload the original file Step 5: Convert Step 6: Redownload/Save the file in the n...

Earlier this week Google announced that you can now insert checkboxes into Google Sheets. This means your many ideas for its use can begin. Wanting to see what an easy set up would look like I created a short attendance sheet with the checkboxes. Then, I discovered, by accident, that you can incorporate them into your formulas. A checkbox that's been filled in shoes up as a 'True' value while a checkbox not marked is 'False'. Testing the CountIf formula I was able to get my formula to count how many times a student was in attendance or absent. Trying to think of other uses for the checkboxes to be used I came up with: Attendance Reading logs Chore lists/charts Material pick up/drop offs Clothing sizes for ordering Signing up for days/times ETC. By using the checkboxes in a formula, you could then put your information into a pivot table or chart. Let your imagination go and think of how this could be useful to you. If you think of any others ways t...